One of my favourite
party stories, whenever I am short of material to make an impression, is my
linguistic-anthropological revelation in faraway Louisiana, southern United
States. New Orleans is a city where I love escaping to, at the slightest
excuse. One of them is Mardi Gras, a sumptuously festive carnival, where Cajun food,
parades, costumes, alligators, swamps (or bayous), voodoo stories, music, booze
on the streets, and late-night revelry assemble for an inhibition-free getaway.
Especially on Bourbon Street in the historic French Quarter, where the currency
du jour is colourful beads, with
which voyeurs can barter for lusty eyefuls with other willing party animals. As
I meandered deeper into Vieux Carré,
I stumbled across a saner form of hedonism: jazz music, in its most pristine,
down to earth form – quite literally actually, because I had to sit on the floor
in a shabby, sultry room, for an exquisite concert by the Preservation Hall,
where performers, coming straight out of history books, sweated it out on the
saxophone.
So, when the jazz
group visited my hometown in Texas sometime later, I could not resist. This
time it was in a bead-less environment, where attendees had reserved seats,
wore tuxedos, and the repertoire was palatable to all. Actually, it was clean,
sophisticated, and soporifically boring, until I jumped out of my slumber. They were singing
in kreol! An exotic form of kreol, but I could nonetheless understand almost
every word – in a place where nobody knows my country, let alone my language.
It was intriguing, and I later decided to chat with the singers backstage.
Surprise gave way to shock when the singer claimed he did not understand his
words! It seems that la langue de Molière
was suppressed after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase by the United States from the
French. Songs were transmitted from generation to generation of Creoles (or
Cajuns), without explanatory notes on the lyrics in the new French-unfriendly
world.
It is fascinating
that languages evolving independently in remote parts of the world could be almost
identical. The underlying conditions were, of course, the same: settlers from
different parts of the world trying to communicate with each other and with
colonisers, in this case French. It is quite similar to the evolution of
species, governed by natural laws, like those Darwin uncovered. The evolution of
languages is studied under the umbrella of phylogenetics, a field that aims at
finding evolutionary relatedness, or tree of life, among species. For instance,
what are those genes in our DNA that make men closer to chimpanzees than rats or pigs – although some women may argue that point. In linguistic evolution, words mutate quite like genes – slight alterations that create French-based words like
"dife" or "vini" identically used in Mauritius, Haiti, or
Louisiana.
The relationship
between kreol morisien, our lingua fraca and greatest unifier, to other kreol
variants in the world begs for closer studies. The evolution of kreol languages across the world could be material for dissertations for our graduates in humanities or languages – along with linguists and even geneticists.
I commend efforts (and courage) to introduce kreol in our schools, for our often-maligned language can be a powerful tool for instruction, and thus contribute, with a local flavour, to academic and artistic progress. Many fear the decline of our education standards with kreol. I would postulate that, let alone arithmetic
and the like, even English and French will probably be better learnt through a
well structured kreol, with an enriched vokabiler
and lortograf.
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